Co-doping effect of lead or erbium upon the spectroscopic properties of bismuth doped optical fibres

Abstract The effect of the lead or erbium co-doping upon the spectroscopic properties has been systematically investigated through the analysis of the absorption and emission spectra of Bi doped fibre (BDF), Bi/Pb and Bi/Er co-doped fibre (BPDF and BEDF). All these BDFs have a broadband emission from 1000 nm to 1600 nm. The Pb or Er co-doping in BDFs will evidently reduce the formation of bismuth related active centres (BACs) due to the formation of other types’ centres and then restrain the emission of BAC through their competition of the pump consumption and the cross energy transfer among these active centres. Further analysis indicates that the Pb co-doping effect to restrain the formation of BAC and its emission is stronger than that of Er to some degree, possibly due to the analogy property between Bin+ and Pbn+ with isoelectronic configures. In addition, the analysis of the BAC concentration indicates that the atom concentration measured by energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) analyser has a large gap with the effective content reflected from the absorption and emission. All these results point out a way to design and fabricate bismuth doped/co-doped fibre with high performance in future.